Albert Bates, guide for our post-petroleum, globally warmed future

The April issue of Vanity Fair-online features The Farm, an intentional community in Tennessee. Albert Bates gets a lot of ink in that article, as he has spent most of his life on The Farm making his mark in both publishing and education. There, his original skill set as a lawyer and horseman in 1972 was expanded to include Permaculture design, and he became an author (Climate in Crisis, introduction by Al Gore, 1990). He became a global authority on ecovillages, founding the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology. He directs the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm, where he has instructed students from over 50 nations since 1994.

More recently he has been warning people about petrocollapse and sudden sea-level rise. His latest book The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook came out last fall from New Society Publishers. He has spoken at Culture Change’s Petrocollapse Conferences in New York City and Washington, DC, and has just returned from a series of California appearances. Rare is there a fortuitous blend of knowledge, wisdom and patience in one public figure for the task at hand, so let us see what such a person, Albert Bates, has to tell Culture Change readers.


Albert K. Bates is a very busy man, but well-rounded and generous enough to keep abreast of many efforts begging his attention. So when I asked him to comment on a reader’s reaction to Alice Friedemann’s “Peak Soil” new tour de force on biofuels, I was rewarded with these inspiring words:

Culture Change